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The U.S. App Store’s downloads have surpassed China’s downloads for the first time since 2014, in a new milestone. According to data from Sensor Tower’s Q2 2020 report, out today, the U.S. App Store saw 27.4% year-over-year growth in the quarter, compared to the 2.1% growth for the China App Store. During the quarter, the U.S. App Store generated 2.22 billion new installs compared with China’s 2.06 billion downloads, to regain the top position. This then translated to the U.S. beating China on App Store consumer spend, as well.

Contributing the shift, was the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on both China and the U.S.

The U.S. surpassed China on installs beginning in April and lasting all the way through June, the firm found.

China in Q2, meanwhile, was coming down from its own abnormally high number of downloads in March and April, due to COVID-19. But as its download figures began to normalize, the pandemic was wreaking havoc in the U.S., where it had hit slightly later.

This led to the U.S. to see a surge in downloads as suddenly, the population was forced to work from home, attend school from home, and entertain themselves at home with apps, games and streaming services.

Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch there was particularly significant growth in U.S. business and education apps in Q2, as a result. These categories were the largest contributors to the U.S. surpassing China’s installs.

Business app downloads grew 133.3% in Q2, followed by education (84.4%), health & fitness (57.7%), news 44.9%), and social networking (42.4%).

Video conferencing app Zoom, in particular, had a breakout quarter and even shattered the record for App Store installs with nearly 94 million total downloads in a single quarter. The prior record had been set by TikTok, which had in Q1 2020 seen 67 million downloads in a single quarter. No other non-game app has ever surpassed 50 million installs in a quarter, Sensor Tower noted.

TikTok still had a strong Q2, with nearly 71 million App Store downloads in the quarter, representing 154% year-over-year growth. Its top two download markets were both the U.S. and China — the latter where it’s known as Douyin.

 

Mobile gaming was also a big hit in the U.S., as people stayed home under government lockdowns. Top mobile games by App Store downloads included titles like Save The Girl, Roblox, Go Knots 3D, Coin Master, Tangle Master 3D, Fishdom, ASMR Slicing, Call of Duty: Mobile, and others.

On this front, Roblox had a stellar quarter as kids stayed at home and went online gaming, due to being disconnected from school and their playmates in real-life. Roblox’s gaming app shot up the U.S. rankings from No. 11 in Q1 2020 to No. 2 in Q2, and achieved a new high of 8.6M downloads in the quarter.

Rollic Games had two hits in the quarter, Go Knots 3D and Tangle Master 3D, each with over 5 million App Store downloads. Its Repair Master 3D title also came in at No. 20.

Both Zoom and Rollic Games were the only new top publishers to find themselves in the top 10 on the App Store in Q2, the report found.

Though the U.S. surpassed China in the quarter for the first time in years, the rest of the top five — Japan, Great Britain, and Russia — remained the same as last quarter, though growing on a year-over-year basis.

Related to the surge of new downloads, the U.S. also surpassed China on consumer spending on the App Store for the first time since Q4 2018 — but that was only by 1.6% (around $53M).  In Q2 2020, the U.S. surpassed China by 14% or about $717 million.

The U.S. also saw more significant quarter-over-quarter growth in spending during the COVID-19 outbreak growing 20% between Q1 and Q2. In China, the consumer spending growth on the App Store was just 5% between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020, when it felt the full impact of the virus.

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter has said that there is “no evidence” that attackers obtained user account passwords after its security breach on Wednesday, which forced the company to lock down user accounts to prevent verified users from tweeting.

In a series of tweets on Thursday — almost exactly a day after the mass account hijacking started — the social media giant said: “We have no evidence that attackers accessed passwords. Currently, we don’t believe resetting your password is necessary.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, and as part of our incident response yesterday to protect people’s security, we took the step to lock any accounts that had attempted to change the account’s password during the past 30 days,” it said. “As part of the additional security measures we’ve taken, you may not have been able to reset your password. Other than the accounts that are still locked, people should be able to reset their password now.”

Twitter said that it’s “working to help people regain access to their accounts” following the security incident. Many high-profile accounts, including news organizations, were still locked out from their accounts by Thursday morning. Some are still locked and unable to tweet.

News of the incident broke in real-time — on the social network, no less — after cryptocurrency sites were hijacked to send tweets promoting a common cryptocurrency scam. Several high-profile accounts, including @apple and @binance, as well as celebrities @billgates, @jeffbezos, and @elonmusk — which collectively have 90 million followers — were hacked as part of the mass account hijackings.

A public record of the cryptocurrency wallet showed hundreds of transactions, amounting to over $100,000, in just a few hours.

Twitter later confirmed that hackers launched a “coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.”

A hacker with direct knowledge of the Twitter incident told TechCrunch that another hacker, who goes by the handle “Kirk,” gained access to an internal Twitter “admin” tool, which they then used to hijack high-profile Twitter accounts and spread the cryptocurrency scam.

It’s not known if other hackers also had access to the admin tool. The FBI is now investigating the incident, a spokesperson said Thursday.

But questions remain over exactly how much access the hackers gained, or if the hackers were able to read users’ private direct messages.

Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator, said in a statement that in a private meeting in 2018, Twitter’s chief executive Jack Dorsey said the company “was working on end-to-end encrypted direct messages,” a kind of encryption that would prevent even Twitter from reading users’ messages.

“It has been nearly two years since our meeting, and Twitter DMs are still not encrypted, leaving them vulnerable to employees who abuse their internal access to the company’s systems, and hackers who gain unauthorized access,” said Wyden. “While it still isn’t clear if the hackers behind yesterday’s incident gained access to Twitter direct messages, this is a vulnerability that has lasted for far too long, and one that is not present in other, competing platforms.”

“If hackers gained access to users’ DMs, this breach could have a breathtaking impact, for years to come,” the lawmaker said.

We asked Twitter several questions about direct messages, including whether the company has any evidence that the hackers gained access to users’ DMs; what protections it puts in place to prevent unauthorized access — including from Twitter employees; and if there are any plans to implement DM end-to-end encryption.

When reached, a Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Trump campaign’s unlikely digital marketing whiz is on the outs.

Brad Parscale made headlines for his social media savvy in 2016, a strategy still credited for giving the then-candidate a major boost by flooding social platforms, most notably Facebook, with targeted advertising. Parscale was named the Trump campaign’s digital director in 2016 and in 2018 ascended to the role of campaign manager, leading Trump’s bid for reelection.

In 2016, the Trump campaign outspent Hillary Clinton by $16 million on the platform, pushing out 5.9 million variations on ads and aggressively optimizing to replicate successes and avoid failed tactics in the process. During the same time period, the Clinton campaign only ran 66,000 different ads, roughly as many as the Trump campaign tested in a single day.

“Twitter is how [Trump] talked to the people, Facebook was going to be how he won,” the brash digital director told 60 Minutes in an election post-mortem the next year. In the same interview, Parscale explained how the campaign brought in “embeds” — employees from Facebook that taught Parscale and his staff how to hone their skills on the platform.

Under Parscale, the Trump campaign also reverse-engineered ad audiences from its current support base rather than targeting ads broadly or looking at traditional demographics.

“Brad Parscale, who has been with me for a very long time and has led our tremendous data and digital strategies, will remain in that role, while being a Senior Advisor to the campaign,” Trump wrote in the announcement.

As the Daily Beast reports, the title change formalizes the reality on the ground. Parscale had reportedly already taken a back seat on broad strategy to his 2016 communications director Jason Miller and deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien, who will step up as campaign manager.

The eleventh hour campaign change is certainly also a product of the president’s very real reelection concerns. The Trump administration’s national failure to rise to meet the coronavirus crisis, Trump’s ongoing racist appeals in the midst of a civil rights movement and his total lack of messaging discipline combines for a rocky path to reelection — a reality that lopsided polls reflect.

Parscale was reportedly already on the outs. CNN reported earlier this year that Trump berated and threatened to sue Parscale over plummeting poll numbers during the president’s early pandemic failures. That moment came after Trump appeared to recommend ingesting potentially deadly disinfectants as a treatment for the virus.

Recent events likely heightened that tension further. When President Trump traveled to a less than half-empty arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, Parscale faced the blame for falling for a prank by TikTok users, led by anti-Trump K-pop fans, who drove up huge registration numbers. While the Trump campaign downplayed the role the fake registrations had in amping the event, the open seats made for a very visible embarrassment for the optics-fixated Trump.

Parscale, a political outsider, famously built the Trump campaign’s first website for $1,500. In spite of his lack of political expertise, he went on to helm Trump’s digital advertising operations as digital director, later becoming synonymous with the campaign itself and its crude, aggressive approach to social media marketing and digital branding.

A Buzzfeed profile from 2017 likened Parscale to a modest, loyal soldier for Trump, one who became “indispensable” for his intuitive ability to communicate the Trump brand. Parscale “believed in the message [and] knew how to promote it on social media.”

That ability to translate Trumpism to the online world developed the roughshod but relentless messaging that still characterizes the Trump campaign. It also had a hand in shaping — and in turn being shaped by — the active online world of Trump loyalists, who likely aren’t going anywhere no matter what happens come November.

Source: Tech Crunch

Another small rocket launcher is readying to demonstrate their ability to launch a vehicle to space, after a few setbacks exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 situation. Astra has just completed a second static test fire of its Rocket 3.1 orbital launch vehicle, and that means it’s now ready for a trip to Alaska where it’ll hopefully make its first trip to orbit from a spaceport in Kodiak.

Astra originally started out as a company with the specific goal of answering the DARPA launch challenge, which asked companies to create a launch vehicle that could tech orbit within a few weeks of each other (originally from separate launch sites, but then later only from separate pads at the same spaceport). The challenge expired without Astra claiming the price, after the 3.0 version of their Rocket failed to reach orbit.

The company has developed, tested and flown three successive generations of Rocket, mostly without much in the way of public fanfare or information sharing. The startup builds its small rockets, which measure roughly 40-feet tall, in Alameda, California at their own factory. In an interview with TechCrunch ahead of their DARPA challenge attempt, Astra CEO and founder Chris Kemp explained that their approach is focused on rapid, at-scale manufacturing and potential failure margins that might be higher than the existing launch companies tolerate.

A kind of mass-market delivery system approach definitely has advantages, and Astra has focused on a launch system that’s much more portable than others for deployment almost anywhere in the world. The company is also focused on small payloads, which it can deliver responsively, so a loss of such a spacecraft wouldn’t be nearly as expensive as, say, a rocket failing and losing a large geosynchronous GPS satellite.

Rocket 3.1 sounds like a relatively minor iteration on Rocket 3.0, vs the large full point updates of prior generations. Astra says it’s currently headed to Kodiak, and that the company is now working to finalize a launch window, with a date to be confirmed for that next big test early next week.

Source: Tech Crunch

What if you could mix and match different tracks from your favorite artists, or create new ones on your own with their voices?

This could become a reality sooner than later, as AI models similar to the ones used to create computer-generated art images and embed deepfakes in videos are being increasingly applied to music.

The use of algorithms to create music is not new. Researchers used computer programs to generate piano sheet music as far back as the 1950s, and musicians from that era such as Iannis Xenakis and Gottfried Koenig even used them to compose their own music.

What has changed are the improvements in generative algorithms, which first gained popularity back in 2014, coupled with large amounts of compute power that are increasingly changing what computers can do with music today.

OpenAI recently released a project called JukeBox, which uses the complex raw audio form to help create entirely new music tracks based on a person’s choice of genre, artist and lyrics. Meanwhile, tools such as Amazon’s AWS DeepComposer and ones released by the Google Magenta project are helping to democratize the ability for developers to experiment with deep learning algorithms and music.

With respect to commercial use, startups such as Amper Music, which lets users create customized, royalty-free music, are seeing businesses adopt computer-generated pieces for a range of use cases surrounding background tracks for videos, and record labels have started to play around with music written by AI.

As the technology and quality of computer-generated music matures, it will likely bring a lot of changes to the media industry from individual artists to record labels to music streaming companies, and present a slew of legal questions over computer-generated music rights.

Source: Tech Crunch

Game publisher Tilting Point announced today that it has made its third acquisition in eight months, buying games, key employees and “most of the assets” from FTX Games and Plamee Studios — both previously owned Playtech, which will be focusing on its gaming and sports betting software moving forward.

Plamee previously developed Narcos: Cartel Wars, which has supposedly made $60 million in revenue since launch. FTX published Cartel Wars, as well as The Walking Dead: Free Casino Slots and Criminal Minds: The Mobile Game. Tilting Point has taken over operations for all three FTX titles, as well as a fourth that’s currently in development.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Last fall, Tilting Point acquired Gondola, a startup that optimizes in-game offers and ads. Then it purchased the mobile game Star Trek Timelines earlier this year, hiring the development team to form a new gaming studio called Wicked Realm Games in the process.

CEO Kevin Segalla said this he’s always seen acquisitions as a big part of the company’s “progressive publishing” model, in which the company is first hired to help developers with user acquisition and then develops a deeper business relationship over time.

“We were built to ultimately be in a position where we could acquire some of the studios that we’re working with,” Segalla said.

He added that the expects “more acquisitions down the pike for sure,” with Tilting Point particularly interested in acquiring games have previously been “constrained in marketing spend” and “clearly are going to have longer legs.”

It sounds like studios acquired by Tilting Point continue to operate with a degree of independence while drawing on the larger company’s resources to grow and monetize their games.

“We truly value the developers’ independence,” Segalla said. “We specifically want to work to continue operating their business and help them accelerate their growth. A lot of development studios are recognizing that scale is becoming more and more important.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon is giving livestreamers a new way to earn commissions on purchases of products showcased in their streams. The company is today adding livestreaming to its existing Amazon Influencer Program which before today, allowed social media influencers to earn money by pointing fans to their favorite Amazon products through posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

The Influencer Program quietly debuted in 2017 as a way for Amazon to capitalize on the growing trend of influencer marketing as a way to drive sales. The program itself is a step up from the Amazon Associates program, as it requires approval to join and gives influencers their own page with an Amazon URL to showcase their recommendations.

Though Amazon already catered to video creators through the program, the new livestreaming option is focused on its own Amazon Live service. A sort of modern-day version of QVC that streams directly on Amazon’s shopping site, Amazon Live launched last year as the retailer’s latest effort to attract consumers by way of live video.

On Amazon Live shows, hosts talk about and demonstrate products, much like they would do on home shopping networks. Underneath the video, a carousel guides consumers purchase the items featured.

This service wasn’t Amazon’s first attempt at live content — the retailer pulled the plug on its earlier effort in live content, a short-lived “show” called Style Code Live that featured hosts with TV and broadcast backgrounds who brought in experts to talk beauty and style tips.

Amazon Live, however, isn’t narrowly focused on fashion and beauty. Instead, its content can cover a range of categories — like cooking, fitness, baby, home, auto, electronics, toys, pets, moves and TV, industrial and much more. There are also multiple live channels to flip through, unlike on cable TV shopping networks.

To broadcast to Amazon Live, video creators and now, influencers use the Amazon Live Creator app to livestream and chat with viewers as they show off the products to be shopped. On the Amazon Live homepage, fans can also chat with the host and one another in a Twitch-like side panel next to the live video.

You can see a few influencers’ streams in action, with early adopters Mirror & Thread, Beauty by Carla, The Deal Guy, and BrickinNick already available on Amazon Live.

In addition, influencers who livestream on Amazon Live as a part of the new program will have their videos not only streamed on the Amazon Live homepage itself, but also on their own dedicated Amazon storefront. As they grow their fanbase, they can move up levels from “Rising Star” to “Insider” to “A-List.”

These tiers have various rewards and features. Rising Star, for example, offers paid commission on qualifying purchases through Amazon’s Onsite Associates program, while higher levels get to have their videos showcased on product detail pages in addition to their own storefront and Amazon Live. A-List’ers also receive priority support and special access to Amazon Live events and opportunities, says Amazon.

“We’re focused on bringing customers fun and interactive shopping experiences, while also helping influencers grow their businesses on Amazon,” said Amazon Live Director, Munira Rahemtulla, in a statement. “Livestreaming enables creativity, connection, and inspiration, and the opportunities are endless – we’re excited to introduce the Amazon Live Creator app to influencers and can’t wait to see what they’ll create for Amazon customers,” she added.

TechCrunch asked Amazon to clarify how influencers are compensated for their streams, given that today’s social media personalities have a number of way to work with brands for profit — including through YouTube BrandConnect, Facebook’s Brand Collaborations, and other programs, for example. The company has so far declined to provide further context, but we’ll update if that changes.

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Snap debuted its developer platform two years ago, and though it’s amassed several hundred integrations inside third-party apps, the company is still looking to scale deeper relationships with the developers on Snap Kit.

Today, the social media company announced Yellow Collabs. The remote 13-week program allows companies to dive deeper into integrating their apps with Snap Kit with a number of instruction paths based on their interests in specific elements of the platform. Companies can choose to work with Snap around integrating with their apps with the entire Snap Kit platform, or dive deeper into Snap Minis, Dynamic Lenses, Scan or Snap ML feature verticals.

The company opened up applications for the new program today, which kicks off September 21 and runs through December 18 of this year.

Snap’s Yellow division had previously only been home to its small startup accelerator that invests in early-stage companies. The division, headed up by Mike Su and Alexandra Levitt, has debuted three batches of startups thus far and is currently readying timelines for their fourth batch.

While the Yellow accelerator hasn’t mandated that admitted founders integrate Snap Kit into their platforms, getting onsite assistance in doing so has been a sell for some startups in the program. Levitt tells TechCrunch that the accelerator was having to turn away applications from growth-stage startups, larger companies and non-profits who had interesting pitches for Snap integrations but weren’t ideal fits for the accelerator format. Levitt hopes this new program can help ambitious developer get assistance in getting the most out of the platform, while “offering a closer relationship with the Snap team.”

“We hope this program can help bring in applications from companies that might not have been able to execute in a self-service manner,” Levitt says.

While program sits inside Yellow, Snap won’t be making any investments or receiving equity in the companies. Collabs aligns on the education element of the startup accelerator even it the goals are a bit different.  It’s an interesting marriage, and also a sign of Snap getting more serious about driving deeper partnerships and forming earlier bonds with the companies on its developer platform.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Trump administration has backed down from plans to revoke visas of international students studying in the U.S., whose schools planned to take their classes exclusively online in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The reversal comes as over a dozen universities and colleges threatened legal action against the administration’s order. The multi-faceted effort also was led by attorneys general in 17 states, including D.C., led by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

On Tuesday, Harvard and MIT had a remote hearing to share a case against ICE’s rule, which would have put the lives of millions of international students in jeopardy. Within minutes of the hearing, Homeland Security agreed to revoke its initial plans to only allow international students to stay in the country if they are taking in-person classes.

The new guidance, which is based on March 9 guidelines, will only benefit students who are currently enrolled. This leaves new students or individuals set to come to the United States in the fall in flux.

The rule, announced last Monday, was broadly met with fury from the academic community. Yale Law School’s Dean, Heather Gerken, posted a statement in opposition to the rule. One professor said that “I will teach outside in the snow if I have to,” if it means keeping students in the country.

Developing… more soon

Source: Tech Crunch